IMO...Random is the worst system for queues. Why forcing content blindly instead of just hyping up the bonus for doing something. I wish they could have brought back extra bonus timers for doing some queues rather than this random monster.
IMO...Random is the worst system for queues. Why forcing content blindly instead of just hyping up the bonus for doing something. I wish they could have brought back extra bonus timers for doing some queues rather than this random monster.
Just because they added one new element does not mean that there aren’t more to come. The way this new featured PvE thingy sounds it might actually be that special rewards are back to PvE in the foreseeable future. Something like that has been requested a lot, even in this thread a few pages back.
Looking for a fun PvE fleet? Join us at Omega Combat Division today.
Please state the exact date and time that ISA was ever "difficult"! With Video evidence! Otherwise I call BS.
I would perhaps go so far as to say it used to be "challenging to PuG, and only if you were the lone player that actually new what they were doing, and only had a new ship or halfway build. But it NEVER has been "difficult" with a pre-made.
Many queues these days though are just downright gawd awful. Dranuur Gauntlet is another prime example of time vs reward vs effort failure. Enemies with half a million HP, who can spam Torp Spread every 1.5secs and their "Immune" shield every other 1.5secs, and spawn not in groups of 1 or 2 but in 10's and 20's. The most common thing I see written in team chat is <sarcasm> Hmm, yeah, that was worth it </sarcasm> (paraphrasing). Guess how many of them will do that queue again?
And I agree that things like RNGesus TRIBBLE you over in easy and even fun TFO's like Azure Nebula, make you not all that interested in participating in many queues.
You also have to remember that whether YOU agree or not, most players like having their ego's stroked by the game. All those missions you play, and you are the second coming, A GOD amongst mortals! That feels good, so people go into TFO's with that warm feeling, and then get ganked by ludicrous scaling issues, and poor game mechanics, and suddenly they don't feel good any more ... Guess what they do then? They complain, and if they get annoyed enough, they quit.
And please do NOT even think about sprouting the usual Tribble doodoo about the number of players. The whole rest of the internet KNOWS that the numbers of concurrent players are way down, but instead of actually addressing and fixing issues, they try and hide it, by releasing some new "shiny".
No, I don't think the game is "dying" but they do need to work on player retention, and threads such as the one Kael started about the Tzenkethi BZ, aren't actually helping, because the Devs already KNOW everything that they are being told, they just hope that people will accept the farce that it is, so they don't have to spend resources fixing it. But do that too often, and you'll lose what little loyal audience you had.
Please state the exact date and time that ISA was ever "difficult"! With Video evidence! Otherwise I call BS.
I would perhaps go so far as to say it used to be "challenging to PuG, and only if you were the lone player that actually new what they were doing, and only had a new ship or halfway build. But it NEVER has been "difficult" with a pre-made.
You're jumping from PUG to pre-made now. But yes, only yesterday, as part of a TFO, I was in what was probably the worst ISA, like ever! It's like no one else -- nary a one -- understood the Objectives. It was quite embarrassing. The transformer was getting healed, so we lost the Optional. At least we finished in time, but I was nonetheless shocked to learn not everyone knows ISA by heart, by now.
I was nonetheless shocked to learn not everyone knows ISA by heart, by now.
I wanted to point out that perhaps some of them are new players and thus don't know how the mission works (no one has the time to read the briefing anyway, they should really add a timer), but then I remembered that all the new players have already fled the game after their first TFO experience bugging out every second run (Starbase 1) and then their first weekend event bugging out almost constantly (Sompek). And when they actually got into a working mission, their aft weapons didn't fire. That is, of course, if they were able to log into the game in the first place.
Seeing pugs in my ISA runs who lack #[4-digits] at the end of their handle, but nevertheless manage to have a parse breakdown that looks like a traffic accident, seems to confirm my theory.
Please state the exact date and time that ISA was ever "difficult"! With Video evidence! Otherwise I call BS.
I would perhaps go so far as to say it used to be "challenging to PuG, and only if you were the lone player that actually new what they were doing, and only had a new ship or halfway build. But it NEVER has been "difficult" with a pre-made.
You're jumping from PUG to pre-made now. But yes, only yesterday, as part of a TFO, I was in what was probably the worst ISA, like ever! It's like no one else -- nary a one -- understood the Objectives. It was quite embarrassing. The transformer was getting healed, so we lost the Optional. At least we finished in time, but I was nonetheless shocked to learn not everyone knows ISA by heart, by now.
People are used to having someone there who can solo it.
That, right there, is the inevitable result of the wildly imbalanced DPS in the game.
Yeah, I know, too complicated. "I have invested" and "being better must not be punished" yadda, yadda. Nonsense. Hogwash. Terribly bad systems design that destroys missions. THAT is the reason why so many people don't understand what they are doing: They are never required to, because sometimes, they will succeed without doing anything but shooting at everything that moves.
That's not about "imbalanced" DPS, its because the all the content (that's worth playing) is too effin easy. Players keep getting stronger and that's normal, progression is why a game like this is played. But instead of the game giving players new challenges to face with their increased power, it encourages them to use it to curbstomp the same old newbie zone faster and faster and faster. The reward incentive is forever stuck on whatever finishes the fastest.
The lack of high-end reward incentive is perfectly exemplified with the latest season release with the random queues, where a random Advanced queue always pays the same if not more than Elite and comes with all-marks by default, making Elites completely worthless.
[...]
That's not about "imbalanced" DPS, its because the all the content (that's worth playing) is too effin easy.
And why is it easy? Because it requires little thinking, no understanding of the surrounding environment, no careful maneuvering?
No, of course, by "easy" you mean "high dps can do this quickly". And that is already the fallacy.
Stats are relative. STO's content requires too little stats compared to how much it gives to players, and that makes it too easy.
In fact the whole DPS obsession is a symptom of the easyness. There is a limit to how much defense or support ability you can benefit from, based on how much enemy action you need to negate or reverse to survive. Good enough is good enough, might say. But you can always kill the enemy even faster so DPS is the stat where OPness is potentially infinite.
It's not just that STO lacks content that would take advantage of the DPS potential, but the DPS potential itself exists because STO requires so little of anything else. Against a truly challenging opponent a pure-DPS "glass cannon," no matter how powerful, should get vaped and be looking for some defense and healing.
Involve the player, not the player's build(with the player only pressing space). At least, not just the player's build.
Thing is, RPGs are about builds. They're about preparation and strategy, not twitch-reflex gameplay.
I think STO actually has too many buttons to click already and would rather see more of that console-style automation. It would also be more immersive, because a starship captain mashing on dozens of buttons every 15 seconds to keep up buffs and stuff never happened on any Trek I've seen.
Sigh. Yeah, have it your way and keep finding out that for some weird reason, people only care for their dps and not for what they should actually do with it.
Congratulations for masterfully ignoring the point of the post.
Maybe. But look at the general reception of the Europa class. "Uhhh, only 2 tac consoles? This is Charly Romeo Alfa Pappa!" Nobody even seemed to GET what the ship was about, because the 500k dps makes one ship worth 50 (sic!) enemy ships, so why bother with tactics?
And that's a trap that the devs built for themselves.
Most players can't do that level of DPS. In fact that was the problem with DR: the enemy HP on advanced TFOs was calculated using low-tier DPS-league numbers that your average player stares at in amazement.
It's like with the Freelancer job in Final Fantasy 5, it's versatile and customizable, and it's sole purpose is to let the player min-max the ---- out of their team setups. There's a monster in the game called Omega 2. You will not beat it using ordinary characters, in part because it's an optional UBER-boss, but also because the devs were expecting you to min-max your party to fight late-game bosses. The sort of min-maxing I did to beat Omega 2 was nuclear overkill for ordinary fights, even fights against late-game mooks.
But that's the essence of the DPS leagues. Tinker with builds to optimize them until you hit a point where victory is a foregone conclusion.
Maybe. But look at the general reception of the Europa class. "Uhhh, only 2 tac consoles? This is Charly Romeo Alfa Pappa!" Nobody even seemed to GET what the ship was about, because the 500k dps makes one ship worth 50 (sic!) enemy ships, so why bother with tactics?
And that's a trap that the devs built for themselves.
Most players can't do that level of DPS. In fact that was the problem with DR: the enemy HP on advanced TFOs was calculated using low-tier DPS-league numbers that your average player stares at in amazement.
Exactly as it should. I don't see why people who don't have even entry-level performance at the game should be expected to succeed in Advanced content. The clue is in the name. The player who "stares at it in amazement" should've gone back to Normal. That's literally what Normal is for. Instead, they whined at the devs en masse until they turned Advanced into just another Easy Mode, ruining it for those who actually liked the challenge.
Elite, of course, largely came pre-ruined since the only unique reward at that level was the next-to-useless Salvaged Technology and nothing could ever stand up to CCA in dil/time.
It's like with the Freelancer job in Final Fantasy 5, it's versatile and customizable, and it's sole purpose is to let the player min-max the ---- out of their team setups. There's a monster in the game called Omega 2. You will not beat it using ordinary characters, in part because it's an optional UBER-boss, but also because the devs were expecting you to min-max your party to fight late-game bosses. The sort of min-maxing I did to beat Omega 2 was nuclear overkill for ordinary fights, even fights against late-game mooks.
Too bad there is no Omega 2 in STO. No raids, no 100-floor dungeons with no save point, no bonus bosses. What little hard content there is (like Korfez) doesn't give even a cosmetically unique reward, so there's no point playing it. The minmaxers are instead left doing their nuclear overkill on the newbie zones and getting rewarded for it better than they would for trying out whatever hard content there is left.
False drama by overstatement much? Changing and then restoring a single boff ability takes far less than 5-30 minutes as does changing a single kit ability.
you now have to purge all the invisible ghost icons clogging the tray, put everything back on it, attach the new skill to the relevant buttons so that it actually does something, make sure everything still works, etc. Otherwise you'll end up flying the thing into a fight and finding out that your engines don't work and your ship cannot move for some reason. Or self-destructs when you try to fire your guns. Yes, actually happened on the Dyson ship, which apparently decided to bind "Abandon Ship" to "fire weapons", and exactly why you need to do a preflight check on everything.
You tell some good tales. AS was removed from the game quite some time ago but this sounds entertaining.
I had a very old key bind bug that hit me in a queue. Instead of activating my main shield heal I'd set off my fireworks and then promptly blow up. Often wonder what people where thinking after seeing me do this several times in a row.
Involve the player, not the player's build(with the player only pressing space).
/--/
They don't even understand how "has higher DPS due to gear and stufff" has NOTHING to do with being "advanced".
I dare you to copy either one of my builds (links to both are in my signature) and then let's see how much DPS you can actually do. There's so much more to this than just copying a build and then mashing spacebar.
Involve the player, not the player's build(with the player only pressing space).
/--/
They don't even understand how "has higher DPS due to gear and stufff" has NOTHING to do with being "advanced".
I dare you to copy either one of my builds (links to both are in my signature) and then let's see how much DPS you can actually do. There's so much more to this than just copying a build and then mashing spacebar.
I would love to see that, but of course he won't do it.
He's had the same agenda from day one, antagonizing DPS players because they do what he can't. He's transparent, petty and pathetic and overall not worth your time.
I had a very old key bind bug that hit me in a queue. Instead of activating my main shield heal I'd set off my fireworks and then promptly blow up. Often wonder what people where thinking after seeing me do this several times in a row.
I don't know about them, but I would have thought you were hilarious.
Involve the player, not the player's build(with the player only pressing space).
/--/
They don't even understand how "has higher DPS due to gear and stufff" has NOTHING to do with being "advanced".
I dare you to copy either one of my builds (links to both are in my signature) and then let's see how much DPS you can actually do. There's so much more to this than just copying a build and then mashing spacebar.
Yeah, sure. In fact, you probably could do that DPS without all that gear and those traits, right. They are just there for cosmetic purposes.
Your point being...? Sure, my gear is optimized for maximum performance. That doesn't mean that gear is the only factor when it comes to performing well.
In fact, I have a video where I threw completely random stuff on my ship and still managed to outperform majority of pugs I see in my runs.
Comments
Original STO beta tester.
Just because they added one new element does not mean that there aren’t more to come. The way this new featured PvE thingy sounds it might actually be that special rewards are back to PvE in the foreseeable future. Something like that has been requested a lot, even in this thread a few pages back.
Looking for a fun PvE fleet? Join us at Omega Combat Division today.
I would perhaps go so far as to say it used to be "challenging to PuG, and only if you were the lone player that actually new what they were doing, and only had a new ship or halfway build. But it NEVER has been "difficult" with a pre-made.
Many queues these days though are just downright gawd awful. Dranuur Gauntlet is another prime example of time vs reward vs effort failure. Enemies with half a million HP, who can spam Torp Spread every 1.5secs and their "Immune" shield every other 1.5secs, and spawn not in groups of 1 or 2 but in 10's and 20's. The most common thing I see written in team chat is <sarcasm> Hmm, yeah, that was worth it </sarcasm> (paraphrasing). Guess how many of them will do that queue again?
And I agree that things like RNGesus TRIBBLE you over in easy and even fun TFO's like Azure Nebula, make you not all that interested in participating in many queues.
You also have to remember that whether YOU agree or not, most players like having their ego's stroked by the game. All those missions you play, and you are the second coming, A GOD amongst mortals! That feels good, so people go into TFO's with that warm feeling, and then get ganked by ludicrous scaling issues, and poor game mechanics, and suddenly they don't feel good any more ... Guess what they do then? They complain, and if they get annoyed enough, they quit.
And please do NOT even think about sprouting the usual Tribble doodoo about the number of players. The whole rest of the internet KNOWS that the numbers of concurrent players are way down, but instead of actually addressing and fixing issues, they try and hide it, by releasing some new "shiny".
No, I don't think the game is "dying" but they do need to work on player retention, and threads such as the one Kael started about the Tzenkethi BZ, aren't actually helping, because the Devs already KNOW everything that they are being told, they just hope that people will accept the farce that it is, so they don't have to spend resources fixing it. But do that too often, and you'll lose what little loyal audience you had.
You're jumping from PUG to pre-made now. But yes, only yesterday, as part of a TFO, I was in what was probably the worst ISA, like ever! It's like no one else -- nary a one -- understood the Objectives. It was quite embarrassing. The transformer was getting healed, so we lost the Optional. At least we finished in time, but I was nonetheless shocked to learn not everyone knows ISA by heart, by now.
I wanted to point out that perhaps some of them are new players and thus don't know how the mission works (no one has the time to read the briefing anyway, they should really add a timer), but then I remembered that all the new players have already fled the game after their first TFO experience bugging out every second run (Starbase 1) and then their first weekend event bugging out almost constantly (Sompek). And when they actually got into a working mission, their aft weapons didn't fire. That is, of course, if they were able to log into the game in the first place.
Seeing pugs in my ISA runs who lack #[4-digits] at the end of their handle, but nevertheless manage to have a parse breakdown that looks like a traffic accident, seems to confirm my theory.
U.S.S. Buteo Regalis - Brigid Multi-Mission Surveillance Explorer build
R.R.W. Ri Maajon - Khopesh Tactical Dreadnought Warbird build
My Youtube channel containing STO videos.
The lack of high-end reward incentive is perfectly exemplified with the latest season release with the random queues, where a random Advanced queue always pays the same if not more than Elite and comes with all-marks by default, making Elites completely worthless.
In fact the whole DPS obsession is a symptom of the easyness. There is a limit to how much defense or support ability you can benefit from, based on how much enemy action you need to negate or reverse to survive. Good enough is good enough, might say. But you can always kill the enemy even faster so DPS is the stat where OPness is potentially infinite.
It's not just that STO lacks content that would take advantage of the DPS potential, but the DPS potential itself exists because STO requires so little of anything else. Against a truly challenging opponent a pure-DPS "glass cannon," no matter how powerful, should get vaped and be looking for some defense and healing.
Thing is, RPGs are about builds. They're about preparation and strategy, not twitch-reflex gameplay.
I think STO actually has too many buttons to click already and would rather see more of that console-style automation. It would also be more immersive, because a starship captain mashing on dozens of buttons every 15 seconds to keep up buffs and stuff never happened on any Trek I've seen.
It's like with the Freelancer job in Final Fantasy 5, it's versatile and customizable, and it's sole purpose is to let the player min-max the ---- out of their team setups. There's a monster in the game called Omega 2. You will not beat it using ordinary characters, in part because it's an optional UBER-boss, but also because the devs were expecting you to min-max your party to fight late-game bosses. The sort of min-maxing I did to beat Omega 2 was nuclear overkill for ordinary fights, even fights against late-game mooks.
But that's the essence of the DPS leagues. Tinker with builds to optimize them until you hit a point where victory is a foregone conclusion.
My character Tsin'xing
Elite, of course, largely came pre-ruined since the only unique reward at that level was the next-to-useless Salvaged Technology and nothing could ever stand up to CCA in dil/time.
Too bad there is no Omega 2 in STO. No raids, no 100-floor dungeons with no save point, no bonus bosses. What little hard content there is (like Korfez) doesn't give even a cosmetically unique reward, so there's no point playing it. The minmaxers are instead left doing their nuclear overkill on the newbie zones and getting rewarded for it better than they would for trying out whatever hard content there is left.
I had a very old key bind bug that hit me in a queue. Instead of activating my main shield heal I'd set off my fireworks and then promptly blow up. Often wonder what people where thinking after seeing me do this several times in a row.
I dare you to copy either one of my builds (links to both are in my signature) and then let's see how much DPS you can actually do. There's so much more to this than just copying a build and then mashing spacebar.
U.S.S. Buteo Regalis - Brigid Multi-Mission Surveillance Explorer build
R.R.W. Ri Maajon - Khopesh Tactical Dreadnought Warbird build
My Youtube channel containing STO videos.
I would love to see that, but of course he won't do it.
He's had the same agenda from day one, antagonizing DPS players because they do what he can't. He's transparent, petty and pathetic and overall not worth your time.
I don't know about them, but I would have thought you were hilarious.
Your point being...? Sure, my gear is optimized for maximum performance. That doesn't mean that gear is the only factor when it comes to performing well.
In fact, I have a video where I threw completely random stuff on my ship and still managed to outperform majority of pugs I see in my runs.
U.S.S. Buteo Regalis - Brigid Multi-Mission Surveillance Explorer build
R.R.W. Ri Maajon - Khopesh Tactical Dreadnought Warbird build
My Youtube channel containing STO videos.